Review: Eight Perfect Hours

Lia Louis’s novel Dear Emmie Blue completely blew me away in 2020 so I was very much looking forward to her 2021 release, Eight Perfect Hours. It took me awhile to get to it – only reading it earlier this year – but I quite enjoyed it. Perhaps not as much as the earlier novel but it was still a good story in its own right.

Here’s the book’s description:

On a snowy evening in March, 30-something Noelle Butterby is on her way back from an event at her old college when disaster strikes. With a blizzard closing off roads, she finds herself stranded, alone in her car, without food, drink, or a working charger for her phone. All seems lost until Sam Attwood, a handsome American stranger also trapped in a nearby car, knocks on her window and offers assistance. What follows is eight perfect hours together, until morning arrives and the roads finally clear.
The two strangers part, positive they’ll never see each other again, but fate, it seems, has a different plan. As the two keep serendipitously bumping into one another, they begin to realize that perhaps there truly is no such thing as coincidence.

First things first. This one was, for some reason, somewhat marketed as a Christmas/holiday novel. I don’t know if that was the intention of the publisher or if it wasn’t even them marketing it, it was early readers deciding that a book released in the late fall with a cute, wintery cover MUST be a Christmas book. It’s so not. The story opens in March. *checks calendar* Yeah, nowhere near Christmas. It’s not even really a wintery novel. Noelle and Sam get meet each other because of a freak snowstorm and the rest of the novel takes place over the following months. So, basically, you could read this one at any time of year and be delighted.

You really have to believe – or allow yourself to believe for the length of the novel – in the concept of fate to be able to fully enjoy this story. It was a sweet idea and something I had fun thinking about while reading. It was a nice little escape from *waves arms at world* The little coincidences that were revealed throughout the story were sometimes completely unexpected and kept things from getting too predictable.

Noelle’s ex-boyfriend was a complete asshat. She’s the caregiver to her mother, who had had a stroke a few years prior and really struggled with going out because she knew she wasn’t the person she used to be. So things fell to Noelle. All the things, basically. Earning money, paying bills, and so on. Her ex couldn’t understand why she kept looking after her mother and didn’t go after what she really wanted in life (to be a floral designer). No one can fully understand someone else’s life but he was such a…well, kind of a gaslighting jerk about it. She deserved so much better and I hated reading as she got sucked back into his orbit. I might be a bit harsh but I had such a “yuck” feeling when reading the scenes with him that that feeling has stuck with me way more than some of the other things about this book.

Sam, on the other hand, was lovely. That said, I don’t feel like I really got to know either character enough over the course of the story which may have kept me from enjoying it as much as I expected. I cared about them both, most definitely. I wanted to read their Happily Ever After. But there just seemed to be a little something missing from their development.

All in all, Eight Perfect Hours was a lovely read. It wasn’t, unfortunately, perfect but if you want a sweet, reflective read, Lia Louis’s latest might be the one for you.

Some content warnings: death of a friend/family member years prior, depression (including postpartum), suicide.

My review of Dear Emmie Blue

*An egalley of this novel was provided by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, via NetGalley in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*